Unleashing the potential of youth and women in the agri-preneurship with digitalization
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in collaboration with the Rwanda Development Board (RDB), started the sessions of the digital agriculture and innovation skills learning program and tools piloted with the representatives from groups of youth & women engaged in agri-preneurship across the country.
The development process of this program was done through a working session that engaged eights experts from the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Rwanda Development Board, Rwanda Information Society Authority , Rwanda ICT Chamber of the private sector, FAO and the private sector federation.
The topics developed during this working session include basic digital skills, intermediate digital skills such as access to the market, e-commerce, digital payment, and its linked security to avoid fraud, access to finance, Potential digital solutions with the best farming, and mindset and cultural behavior change to embrace digital agricultural technologies. All these topics have been selected based on the results and needs highlighted by the target audience. This is an outcome of the the need assessment and gap analysis RDB conducted on the digital skills, under “Enhancing digital skills and innovation capabilities to foster agri-preneurship among youth and women in Rwanda” project. The activity carried out in the framework of the Letter of Agreement (LoA) signed early this year between FAO and RDB.
While concluding this development session, Mr. Celestin Kabera, Project Focal point in RDB, thanked the participants and their institutions they were representing for their big contribution and dedication in the process of developing the program and requested their continuous collaboration during the testing, piloting and monitoring expansion of the program. This could help scale up to more actors in agricultural value chains and ensuring its impacts and contribution to the transformation entire agrifood system.
“Allow me to thank you for the incredible commitment and dedication shown in this two and a half days while developing this program; Please let us keep this momentum not only in testing them under this project that is close to its end, but even extending more digital knowledge to more actors in agricultural value chain and ensuring the post training session and success stories with positive in entire agrifood system transformation”. Celestin said.
“In the future, possession of digital skills will be needed in agrifood systems and suitable education and training will be required. Therefore, FAO and all actors mentioned above, are creating this programe to make sure agrifood remain attractive for youth and women and that they possess required skills to cope with future technological and innovative trends and solutions” said Dr. Nikola Trendov, FAO Digital Agriculture and Innovation Specialist.
On behalf of the Ministry of ICT and Innovation representative, Lambert Ntagwabira, Digital Readiness, and Senior Technologist at MINICT, commended the effort of FAO and RDB for organizing the session and said that the work done contributes to Rwanda’s national strategy vision of ensuring 100% digital literacy for youth and 60% for adults by 2024.
“I applaud the effort made by FAO and RDB to organize this important session that is very pertinent in terms of achieving the government’s national strategy for Transformation. These training materials are very useful to farmer’s digital transformation and in collaboration with our institutions; they will be integrated in the existing Digital Ambassadors (DA) Program’s content, to attract more farmers.” Lambert said.
He added that more discussions would continue on how this program could be integrated into Digital Ambassadors Program scale up.
The testing session was organized with objective of piloting with the key representative ( five representatives by district) that this developed learning program on the digital agriculture skills innovation, and promoting them for the future scale , use and uptake. The sessions are bringing together 30 youth and women from each province and engaging the Focal Points from various Ministries that include MINICT, MINICOM, MINAGRI, RISA, and the ICT chamber to ensure a robust and strong collaboration between these institutions for the now and future scale up.
Since last week, these sessions finished in all provinces “Eastern Province, Southern Province, Northern and Western finished these sessions” and Kigali City.
